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Summary
Summary
Oblivion is a heartbreaking, exquisitely written memorial to the author's father, Héctor Abad Gómez, whose criticism of the Colombian regime led to his murder by paramilitaries in 1987. Twenty years in the writing, it paints an unforgettable picture of a man who followed his conscience and paid for it with his life during one of the darkest periods in Latin America's recent history.
Author Notes
Héctor Abad is one of Colombia's leading writers. Born in 1958, he grew up in Medellín, where he studied medicine, philosophy, and journalism. After being expelled from university for writing a defamatory text against the Pope, he moved to Italy before returning to his homeland in 1987.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Colombian author Abad (The Joy of Being Awake) dedicates this loving and sentimental memoir to his father, Hector Abad Gomez, a professor and doctor devoted to his family, "moved to tears.by poetry and music," and committed to a better Colombia. The latter aspiration cost him his life when he was assassinated in 1987, and his son began writing this book five years later. Abad spends much of the book expressing his love for his father, but it is his discussion of Gomez's public health and human rights projects-such as founding "the Colombian Institute of Family Wellbeing, which built aqueducts and sewer systems in villages, rural districts, and cities"-that reveals what a remarkable educator, reformer, and activist the senior Abad was, and how his assassination (most likely ordered by Colombia's political leadership at the time) was a tragedy for a family and a nation. Those unfamiliar with Abad's and Gomez's writings will nevertheless find this timely memoir moving and informative. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A Colombian writer delivers a rousing, affecting tribute to his father, Hctor Abad Gmez, a professor and physician who was murdered in 1987 by radical political opponents. Gmez--who, according to the author, had limited skill with his hands and once inadvertently hastened the death of a surgical patient--moved from private practice to become a passionate advocate for public health, in Colombia and elsewhere, and a fiery writer of books, essays and op-ed pieces opposing violence and promoting personal freedom and equality--ideas sure to get you killed in many places. The son adored the father and writes about what in many was an ideal, if not idyllic, childhood. Gmez was extraordinarily affectionate and latitudinarian in just about everything. He continually encouraged his son, profoundly patient with him and loved him with a patent preference that in some ways, as the author recognizes, was unfair to the author's sisters. Abad remembers the conflicts in his family, notably the deeply pious Roman Catholic women who struggled mightily against the father's more liberal religious views. He also remembers with lingering horror the death of his own talented sister to cancer. The author creates enormous dramatic irony in his text: We know from the beginning that his father will be murdered, so Abad imbues every moment with an aching pathos. The translators have preserved his facile and sophisticated uses of the language. One 205-word sentence, for example, unspools with absolute clarity. Sometimes the detail is grim and wrenching--a sewer pipe clogged with tapeworms, his poor dying sister's physical decline, his father's bullet-riddled corpse. One small reservation: a tendency--somewhat understandable--to quote excessively from his father's publications. Is there a father alive who would not weep at such an artful, tender tribute?]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In this memoir, Colombian novelist Abad (Angosta, 2004) remembers his father, medical doctor and public-health advocate Hector Abad Gomez, who was gunned down by right-wing paramilitary forces in 1987. The elder Abad was gregarious, compassionate, a defender of the poor, and a doctor against pain and fanaticism with a passion for classical music and his rose garden. He was also an unfailingly permissive parent, and his only son loved him fiercely and unabashedly, with an animal love of his scent and his presence. Abad recalls a childhood defined by the competing influences of his father's humanistic beliefs and the strict Catholicism of his mother and his parochial schoolteachers; subtler but still present are the contrasts between his bucolic Colombian surroundings and the politically motivated violence that would eventually claim his father. After much circling around the subject, Abad summons the courage to describe the circumstances of his father's murder six bullets in the head, in broad daylight, on a Medellin street and even now, more than 20 years later, neither Abad nor Colombia have quite healed. This moving memoir is thus also an important work of historical witness.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
OBLIVION" is a searing memoir written with love and blood: both family blood, the kind that's thicker than water, and the spilled blood of barbarism and murder. From the first pages we feel the internal necessity driving this story. It is obvious that Héctor Abad had no choice but to tell it - as a personal catharsis, surely, but also as a reckoning with his country, Colombia, and its near-perpetual state of violent strife. "I draw out these memories from within," Abad tells us, "as one gives birth, as one removes a tumor." Colombia's greatest novelist, Gabriel García Márquez, once lamented that "there has always been civil war" in his country "and there always will be. It's a way of life." This war has been going on for at least 150 years - between Liberals and Conservatives (Colombia's main political parties), secularists and Catholics, armed revolutionaries, drug lords and the army - preventing the country from moving beyond what García Márquez has called its unending "Middle Ages." One way or another, the national drama has touched practically every Colombian family, Abad's more than most. Thus, while "Oblivion" is suffused with politics, it is primarily, and most powerfully, a highly personal coming-of-age story that's also a sharp sociopolitical portrait of its place and time. The place is Medellin, Colombia's second-largest city, and the time is the quarter-century from the early 1960s until 1987. But every word revolves around the author's father, also named Héctor. In literature, we have been conditioned to expect the malignant father of Sylvia Plath's poetry, say, or the predatory father of Edward St. Aubyn's autobiographical novels. In Colombia the saying goes, "A man only has one mother, but his father could be any old son of a bitch." "Oblivion" upends this cliché. "I loved my father with an animal love," Abad writes, "his smell and also the memory of his smell on the bed when he was away on a trip.... I felt for my father the same way my friends said they felt about their mothers. ... He never said no to me." Elsewhere, Abad calls him "my one true savior" and "the solitary nocturnal knight who . . . illuminated everything for me with the light of his intelligence." This tender contract between father and son was never broken. Sometimes it could be oppressive. They loved each other too much, Abad suggests, and we can feel the strain as he measures himself against this "ideal god . . . always there to tell you O.K., fine, yes, as you wish," never offering the relief of the antagonist. Reading "Oblivion," I heard echoes of Kafka's scalding "Letter to My Father," though it conveys the opposite emotion. Like Kafka's father, Abad's occupies every inch of his son's psyche. In middle age, Abad - a well-known novelist and journalist in Colombia - still gauges his behavior by asking what his father would have done. "I find myself obeying him even now." The elder Abad was an epidemiologist and the founder of Colombia's National School of Public Health. Staunchly antiCatholic, indifferent to money (he gave most of his modest salary to students and friends), excessively tolerant yet actively involved in his children's lives, he was, in his son's telling, a maddening, kindly, liberal crusader for social justice whose enlightened ideas were doomed to failure. His passion was preventive medicine - clean drinking water and vaccinations for Colombia's poor. As a teacher, he would drag his students to Medellin's slums, organizing the building of aqueducts and forcing them to examine at close hand the diseases of poverty, in the hope they would take up social medicine instead of treating the wealthy at private clinics. With a grandiosity that may have been necessary given the obstacles, he fancied himself a new kind of doctor: a "poliatrist," or healer of the polis. A BAD succumbs at times to the temptation of hagiography, but it is balanced by his struggle with his father's constant presence, more pervasive than ever in death. He describes his father as an "ideological hybrid" who was branded a "bourgeois" by the left because of his opposition to "the armed struggle" and his occasional alliance with Conservative politicians who could advance his health care policies. But his main enemies were on the right. In the United States he would have been one of many left-leaning Democrats, but in Colombia his initiatives in poor neighborhoods made him an enemy of the state. The ideological and religious divisions in the Abad family mirrored those of the country as a whole. His mother was a "daily-Mass Catholic," in local parlance, who had been raised by her uncle, the ultra-Orthodox archbishop of Medellin. One of her cousins became "the most reactionary priest in the whole of Colombia," the protégé of a notorious monsignor who preached that killing Liberals was "a pardonable sin." Two other cousins, by contrast, became Liberation Theologists, rebel priests and anti-capitalist activists in the slums. His father's side of the family was irreconcilably torn between Liberals and Conservatives. Threatened with death, the author's grandfather had to abandon his farm and flee with his children to a safer part of the country. But he fared better than many, especially during the undeclared civil war known as La Violencia that erupted in 1948, after the assassination of a popular Liberal presidential candidate. La Violencia lasted at least 10 years and resulted in the deaths of at least 200,000 Colombians. During the decades that followed, the purges continued intermittently. When the heat was on, the author's father would scramble for work as a public health consultant abroad until danger passed. For the son, deprived of his benevolent protection, these absences were "a living death." At his mother's insistence, he attended an Opus Dei high school. That his father agreed was emblematic of the contradictions at the heart of their lives. "Go to Mass so your mother doesn't worry," his father would tell him, "but it's all lies." For Abad, the fact that this fundamental difference between his parents never weakened their marriage was an insoluble riddle. His father even seemed to believe that the rigors of an Opus Dei education would benefit his son, as long as he was around to whisper the truth of the Enlightenment in his ear. In this equation, devout "dark Catholicism" belonged to the feminine world of his mother and five sisters and aunts, while science, music, poetry and reason made up the light-filled world of masculinity. Still, it was his mother's financial acumen, turning a small office management company into a prosperous business, that allowed his father to preserve his ideological and intellectual independence. This independence cost him his life. In 1982, at the age of 60, the elder Abad was forced to give up his professorship. Political violence was on the rise. On the radio, in newspaper editorials and in letters, he denounced the military-sponsored death squads that were exterminating political opponents with impunity in the name of fighting a far-left guerrilla group that controlled large portions of the rural countryside. As his former colleagues and students were being gunned down in the streets, Abad was often the lone voice of outrage. Inevitably, he was moved to the top of the hit list. It was one of those terrifying moments in history when assumptions of decency are reversed, baseline human morality turns into a mark of madness, and the few who dare to demand it become pariahs or worse. The murders themselves were distinguished by a kind of lustful barbarity. Victims weren't just executed; their limbs were chopped off. In at least one case a student was tied to a post and blown up with a grenade. Abad knew the risks, and his son, with a subdued touch of anger, hints at the possibility that his martyrdom was a form of suicide. "If they kill me for what I do, would it not be a beautiful death?" Abad says when a member of the family warns him about his denunciations. But these sound like the words of a brave and frightened man seeking the comfort of an idealized courage. It seems likely that the impulse to protest had become a personal necessity, and Abad felt he would be unable to live with himself if he fell silent. For atrocities to have meaning, we must understand their personal cost. In his restrained account of his father's final days and their aftermath, Abad gives us a glimpse of the mute panic and shattering of self-respect that comes from living under a daily reign of state terror. Abad waited 20 years to write this account. Clearly the wait was necessary. At one point he mentions the "twin dangers of nostalgia and despairing bitterness" that threatened to drown his story. The passage of time seems to have given him just enough distance to overcome these dangers. "To remember" in Spanish is "recordar," from "cor," the Latin for "heart." If to remember, then, "means to pass once more through the heart," Abad writes, "then I have always remembered him." This hard-earned memoir is an act of courage in its own right. The author and his father, whose intelligence "illuminated everything for me.' 'If they kill me for what I do, would it not be a beautiful death?' Abad's father said about the risks of activism. Michael Greenberg is the author of the memoir "Hurry Down Sunshine" and the essay collection "Beg, Borrow, Steal."